$500,000 grant gives Obamacare a starring role in TV productions

The California Endowment, a private foundation spending millions to promote President Barack Obama’s signature law, recently provided a $500,000 grant to ensure TV writers and producers have information about the Affordable Care Act that can be stitched into plot lines watched by millions.

The aim is to produce compelling prime-time narratives that encourage Americans to enroll — especially the young and healthy, Hispanics and other key demographic groups needed to make the overhaul a success.

“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said Martin Kaplan of USC’s Norman Lear Center, which received the grant.

The public typically gets as much, if not more, information about current events from favorite TV programs as mainstream news outlets, Kaplan said, so “people learn from these shows.”

California Republican strategist Jonathan Wilcox, who has taught a course on politics and celebrity at USC, believed the attempt to engage Hollywood is coming too late to influence views, and he doubted fictionalized TV would play into families’ decisions about health care.

“This is an attempt to use entertainment pop culture to fix a political challenge,” he said. “It will be received as a partisan political message, no matter how cleverly it’s delivered.”

About 16 percent of Americans are uninsured, and surveys have shown many still know little or nothing about the health care law even though signups for insurance are under way. The challenge for the law’s supporters is to connect with the millions of Americans who for whatever reason haven’t been paying attention.

The 18-month grant, given to the center’s Hollywood Health & Society program, will be used to brief the staffs of television shows and track health overhaul-related depictions on prime time and Spanish-language television.

Since the money was provided so recently, no plot lines involving health care have yet been written. And Kaplan isn’t targeting specific shows.

“We want them to get the facts,” said David Zingale, a California Endowment senior vice president. “We don’t believe the government alone can break through with those facts.”

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The grant announcement comes after the stumbling launch of the federal website where Americans shop for the health insurance they are required to have next year. The White House also has been forced to backtrack on vows that no one would lose their existing coverage and that anyone happy with their current insurance and doctor could keep them.

Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, noted that, to have credibility Hollywood, must present the health-care plan as it has actually rolled out. “If there are drawbacks and glitches and discontent, that should be part of the presentations,” he said.

“It should not be a place to propagandize; it should be a place to have honest open discussion, wrinkles and all, flaws and all, on health reform,” he said.